Mandela sanitized

I am disgusted that my country will be represented at Mandela’s funeral by a Prime Minister who would have supported the preservation of white privilege if he was in power during the fight against apartheid.

‘The ANC is a typical terrorist organisation … Anyone who thinks it is going to run the government in South Africa is living in cloud-cuckoo land’ – Margaret Thatcher, 1987

Have to be aware another kind of sanitization. His attitude toward violence was more tactical and not necessarily philosophical, and even then he went through stages of for and against throughout his life, an attitude that was crucial to his growth and success in SA, and more so, within ANC.

Forcing the assholes to eulogize him is part of his political victory. He changed what it was acceptable to say. A good thing, overall.

Relevant to the OP’s last sentence — the text of Mandela’s 2005 speech in Trafalgar Square for the Campaign to Make Poverty History:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/4232603.stm

Steve, I agree, but it’s important to remember and to help others learn that these people are only sounding nice on a particular issue on which they lost, and to not let them pretend that they were ever right on this.

Barry — that’s right. That’s why I got my daughter to read this 2 minutes before your comment appeared!

Barry- strongly agree. That’s also the reason why the younger generation needs to hear much more about MLK as a genuine American radical (one of the greatest), not just as a plaster saint.

I agree, its disgusting to see the process of historical sanitation take place in front of our eyes. The best we can do is to remember his words and his deeds and make sure we continue to bear witness to the countless freedom fighters around the world that continue to suffer from similar systems of brutality and exploitation.

Long Live Mandela; Long Live MLK; and Long Live the Struggle!

I note with some satisfaction that Telegraph Blogs has pre-emptively shut down comments on all of it’s Mandela coverage. To add to Anderson above, if it’s a sign of victory if your enemies feel they have to eulogise you, it’s a sign of almost total victory when they also feel like they have to tell their own goonsquads to STFU for a day or two at least.

JG, that’s a vicious, stupid thing to say.

“Realist” Here’s a picture of Mandela with Helen Suzman: looks very anti-semitic!

http://cdn.mg.co.za/crop/content/images/2013/07/11/mandela_and_suzman_i2e.jpg/676×380/

So, what’s the story with ANC’s neoliberalism? What’s a good place to read about it (online&free)?

Perhaps if Israel (and it is Israel we are talking about, not Jewish people in general) wanted Mandela to like it more it shouldn’t have been such a great ally of apartheid South Africa.

Mandela had an unwavering and very warm relationship with the Jewish community of South Africa. This is worth reading:

Nelson Mandela, Iconic Leader for Jews of South Africa — and World
Symbol of Black Struggle Built Bridges to Jewish Community: http://forward.com/articles/173992/nelson-mandela-iconic-leader-for-jews-of-south-afr/?p=all#ixzz2mi7UJidH

And on Mandela and Israel, including his consistent support for its right to exist and to defend its borders:
http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Op-Ed-Contributors/Mandela-and-Israel-334174

Also
http://www.jpost.com/Breaking-News/ADL-American-Jewish-Committee-pay-tribute-to-Mandela-334178

@25:

It wasn’t a case of the ANC’s preferences per se, it was just that neo-liberalism was the global regime in force and a neo-liberal compromise with the South African business establishment was what was on offer, in exchange for democratization. So it was a real progressive advance, but also a limited advance, that didn’t necessarily benefit the broad masses of people there all that much.

The broader point is that this occasion shouldn’t be reduced to a cause for self-congratulation among Western leftists, nor for worshiping a plaster saint. (Mandela wasn’t the sole ANC leader and was a good deal more complex and conflicted a figure than usually presented in the media). The usual ideological trope surrounding the Mandela cult is: “why can’t “developing world” leader X be more like Mandela?”, when the peculiar configuration that gave rise to his “success” and the actual complexion of the man himself are being white-washed.

@MPAVictoria – 32

You’re assuming rational goals, intents and thought processes.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/mandela/interviews/alexander.html

Reflections on Mandela from a fellow prisoner who had his respect and passed last year.

@jch, so, was it, in your opinion, an SA-specific development, or a part of the 1980’s-90’s global trend of social democratic revisionism defeating democratic socialism?

MCJ @37
It was more a question, wasn’t it, of does M. piss off the SA corporate establishment and thus ensure that the economic problems he has to deal w in ’94 are even worse b/c of capital flight etc. Thus perhaps more to do w global capitalism and capital mobility, not so much w SA-specific situation.

“it was the AFL-CIO (particularly Walter and Victor Reuther, Jay Lovestone and Irving Brown) who secretly funded the various clandestine black movements”

That makes me proud to be a union member.

And that’s a stupid, vicious thing to praise him for. Because it implies that in the normal course of events, allowing black people political equality leads to a massacre of whites.

That’s one of the more creative malfunctions of reading comprehension that I’ve encountered in a while. What he actually said was that Mandela managed to prevent major bloodshed in a situation that objectively presented a very high risk of it. (Because it was a revolutionary situation, not because of the races involved.) Perhaps you’ve been living on some other planet for awhile (and perhaps you should go back there to do your trolling), but among earthlings this in in fact the thing for which he was most widely, and rightly, admired.

@42 “….. Because it implies that in the normal course of events, allowing black people political equality leads to a massacre of whites”

In any revolution, there is always a danger that the oppressed may turn violently against the oppressors or their perceived agents – or become oppressors somewhere else. That’s not racist, it’s an, at times understanable, aspect of human nature. Look at the French revolution, or even the history of the Boers themselves.

But as Frank Herbert wrote: ” … Atrocity never balances or rectifies the past. Atrocity merely arms the future for more atrocity. It is self-perpetuating upon itself — a barbarous form of incest. Whoever commits atrocity also commits those future atrocities thus bred. ”

Mandela was intelligent and sensitive enough to seek to break the cycle.

RE: bloodbath

I think that the backbencher article is pretty good on this, but the assumptions underlying the statement are problematic on a few levels:

1) It implies that Mandela was the only positive force in the ANC or SA politics in general. Whereas the ANC was always a multi-racial group committed to a multi-racial South Africa, the statement that Mandela was somehow single-handedly responsible from preventing a bloodbath implies that everyone else in the movement were savages being held back by one civilized negro.

2) Whereas claims that a successful revolution will lead to a “bloodbath” are always forthcoming from the defenders of the status quo, I don’t think that this is really borne out by history. The large majority of people killed during the Terror after the French Revolution were petty criminals, not the aristocracy. The Haitian Revolution was much more conservative than is typically believed, and spent more time putting down former slaves who wanted more freedom than was coming to them than the whites who simply packed up and left. Loyalists were harassed after the American Revolution, severely in some cases, but elites like Washington and Adams always sought to quell those looking for punishment. If I were to make a general rule, I would say that the successive government after a revolution tends to try and downplay revenge in order to make stability possible while the defenders of the status quo ante will pretend that every perceived slight to their allies is the same as blood running in the streets. Good for Mandela and the ANC for managing the public relations to not be tarred with that slander, but as mentioned above, this largely was a function of letting business be.

” single-handedly responsible from preventing a bloodbath implies that everyone else in the movement were savages being held back by one civilized negro.”

No it doesnt. It only asks a question (why didnt SA succumb to Civil war considering that x, y and z would suggest it should have) and offers an opinion (primarily because of Mandela)
That doesnt have to be right but its a legitimate question/answer.

Well the question of why states descend into violence really doesnt begin from the notion of ‘savagery’, so I dont think s/he is.

MCJ @ 47 I am afraid your understanding of Bulgaria is pretty limited. The bulgarian elites proved to be exemplarily corrupt and obsequious – the neoliberal looting has been going on there for more than 20 years with little to no reaction from the population, massively brainwashed by right wing propaganda.

Long and rather depressing, but a detailed account of the neo-liberalism of the ANC in power:

http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/12/06/the-mandela-years-in-power/

“It’s been 20 years since the deal. Regardless of the deal, after 20 years of a democratic rule SA has appalling mass-poverty and one of highest Gini index values in the world. Does anyone find this odd?”

No more odd than that after 60 years of independence and democratic rule, India has an even higher rate of poverty than does South Africa. Perhaps where one starts matters?

No it doesnt. It only asks a question (why didnt SA succumb to Civil war considering that x, y and z would suggest it should have) and offers an opinion (primarily because of Mandela) That doesnt have to be right but its a legitimate question/answer

This is entirely correct, IMHO, and the notion that it implies “savages being held back by a civilized negro” is absurd. The power of charismatic leadership, for good or ill, is an old and fairly well-established proposition — Max Weber, anyone? The idea that this is a racist position is, I think, nonsense.

Barbara Walter’s post, linked by ronan @45, is not racist, whether one agrees with it or not. I think there is probably a fair amt to it; Mandela’s attitude of “let bygones be bygones” and his whole approach must have had an effect, I wd think. (Usual caveat, not an expert on SA, etc etc)

Though “one civilized negro” was a bit of snark I still feel justified in using, I pointedly didn’t use the word racist and chose problematic. To elaborate, I think that the idea of the “Mandela Miracle” naively believes a bit of propaganda that the enablers of the apartheid state used and that counter-revolutionaries pretty much always use. Mandela and the ANC’s hope for a racially integrated society was always explicit, as the white ANC revolutionaries could attest. Saying that it was some unheard of possibility that the ANC wouldn’t unleash genocide gives too much credit to apartheid’s supporters by making their resistance sound reasonable.

I mean to take nothing away from Mandela the man, who is without a doubt one of the great heroes of human history (in as much as I can stomach a “great man” theory of human events). I just don’t think that claiming it took some massive force of will to hold back the rest of the South Africans is fair.

Okay, sure, yes. I’m not sure I understand exactly what your critique is. Can you elaborate?

No need for apologies. Thanks for the contribution.

Well, at least the conservative grassroots are consistent in their hate for Mandela:
https://twitter.com/MattBinder/status/408795404458029057

@Bruce Wilder:
1) I didn’t use the word “always”.
2) On the rest of the comment: I think I agree w some of it, not sure I completely understand the rest.

Btw, I’m not esp. interested in defending Mandela’s time as president, which I don’t know the details of and about which I’m sure valid criticisms can be made (and some are linked above); ISTM it’s his career up to the ’94 election, not after it, that will be mainly remembered.

It was the whites who were threatening the bloodbath. If you look through the historical records, they wanted amnesty or they’d burn down the house. Withholding total amnesty was the single biggest bargaining tool the ANC had. If you look at the initial political deal, the idea of some kind of body to look at conditional amnesty was just a single line almost. It was a twelfth hour compromise.

What came out of that was testament to the skill of Mandela, Tutu and the like in spinning this seed of an idea into an instrument of reconciliation.

I’m not quite sure what I said that triggered that

Probably nothing. Comments here go into moderation periodically and at random; that’s just how the system works, or so I gather.

My understanding as someone who followed the news back then but has not been an expert on African affairs for several decades is that most of the violence in SA during the fall of apartheid was between the ANC and the IFP, rather than between Africans and Boers/English. (The IFP was encouraged and probably funded by the SA apartheid government, though.)

The thing to celebrate about Mandela is that he led a freedom movement that mostly depended on moral, economic, and political pressure rather than blood in the streets. (This is not to discount the effect of 1989 on the remaining Cold War “battlefronts.”)

I’m not at all sure what not being “neo-liberal” after that would have bought for anyone, given the circumstances. While countries who are part of that consensus haven’t all done well, those who conspicuously cut themselves off from it have mostly done much worse. When the wind blows one way, you go in that direction.

Bloix at 4:11 pm:
Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot! I come in peace, pretty much.
I recognize your effort there, and commend it.
Sanity, factuality, tempering potentially volatile misconceptions among thoughtful people.
Since I’m clearly not qualified to, could you respond to this:
https://tinyurl.com/mtuyj3c?
Not entrapment, not trying to coyly make some nasty point, truly I’m just flattened by it. It’s bizarre, irrational, and disgusting. One more unneeded example of accusatory hysteria just plain fucking up the discourse.
Is that website a trivial venue? The author a minority voice with no weight? Or something else?
I honestly don’t know, and I’m sincerely asking, rather than just slithering to possibly unfair and inaccurate conclusions.
_
On the OP, Mandela’s place in history’s justifiably secure, but it’s too easy to gloss over how far from his aboriginal African roots he was, for all the music and costume, and how close to European “civilized” values. How acceptably civilized, ultimately.
As opposed to the Kalahari Bushmen. AfaIct, the awful control and subjugation by the SA diamond industry of “their” black miners was a primary influence on the codification that became legal Apartheid. The diamond industry, and the energy industry, are conspiring right now with the Botswanan govt. to rid potentially lucrative mining and fracking sites of their indigenous people.
Numerically the victims are a much smaller population, a thousand or so as against the tens of millions who suffered under Apartheid. The Bushmen are not at all “civilized”, and evidently don’t want to be. It makes their plight easy to ignore, for many.
The same colonialist racism that created the prison-like barracks and maintained “workers” in cruel squalor in the SA diamond mines a century ago is at work today, in Botswana and elsewhere, i.e. the Guarani in the Brazilian Amazon.
They won’t have a Mandela, can’t, because they’re not trying to assimilate into and participate in the culture that oppresses them in order to end that oppression.

On Robespierre: I’m not sure it’s right to characterize him as someone who was just waiting and itching to lop some heads off, and was merely given the opportunity to do so by the counterrevolution. The fact is he opposed the death penalty initially, quite strongly. He also was one of the leading voices against the war the Girondins wanted with Europe, in part b/c he thought it would lead to the kind of internal repression that it did lead to. There clearly was a strain in him of purification through violence, no doubt, but he was much more contingently caught up in that movement, pushed and pulled in all sorts of contradictory ways, than the narrative we have of him allows.

Regarding the issue of violence in revolution, and its relation to Mandela’s legacy, I’ve coincidentally been reading H.S. Harris’ excellent analysis of Hegel’s Phenonmenology. Hegel was of course convinced that the Terror is built into the logic of the Enlightenment itself: there is in the understanding of the world as a mass of rational utilities an unavoidable logic of conflict between the end of individual satisfaction and the means of subordination of the self to the deterministic structures of rational calculation. So that, for the sake of building a world of perfect liberty, fraternity, and equality, it becomes absolutely necessary to confront the individual and her being for herself in the name of the General Will. As Harris writes, “The dream of a world in which ‘thought uses things‘ comes to grief upon the fact that the thinkers themselves are the things to be used.” Or as GWF himself rather laconically puts it, “Self and world are antithetic, and must now collide.”

Viewed through this lens, Mandela’s achievement was considerable. He learned the lesson in absolute negativity taught by the guillotine. Crucially, however, he remained capable of action in the world nonetheless. This action was made possible, I think, because of his willingness to see himself in his enemy, and his enemy in himself. Or as Hegel would have it: “‘Forgiveness’ is the Heart’s renunciation of its higher position, or its non-actual essence, and acknowledgement that that action is in itself good. The word of reconciliation is the Dasein of absolute Spirit intuiting the universal in the singular.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=oRlh2nUWrzs
One of the better films on early “post-Apartheid” South Africa’s failure to actual get rid of Apartheid.

#80 – does your computer not come with google, or what?
Your link is to the website of Arutz Sheva (Channel Seven), an unlicensed radio station with associated media operating out of a West Bank settlement. It is the voice of the Religious Zionist movement, which holds that the entire biblical land of Israel is the God-given birthright of the Jewish people and therefore that any compromise on matters of territory would be a betrayal of God’s commandments. People holding such beliefs are a small but far from trivial minority of Israelis and they are politically influential due to the proportional voting system, whereby governments are always coalitions, and also very well-funded, both through the corrupt “school” funding formula that channels tax dollars to religious organizations and from donations from Americans. To these people, anyone who advocates a two-state solution is an enemy of Israel.

Arutz Sheva uses the name “Israel National News” but it is not state-affiliated. It is owned by a yeshiva (a rabbinical academy). In an interesting twist, the Chief Rabbi of South Africa, who was educated at that yeshiva, gave a public sermon praising Mandela in which he said, “The greatest tribute we can pay is to live like Mandela, in accordance with the values he practiced and taught – values of human dignity, forgiveness, kindness, courage, tenacity, strength, honesty and integrity.”

Within Israel and outside of the settler movement, the public reaction to Mandela’s death in Israel has been one of mourning. Government reaction was uniformly laudatory, http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4462032,00.html

The mainstream press reaction is similar. From an oped in Israel’s largest circulation paper: “Nelson Mandela was undoubtedly the greatest person I ever knew.” From the second-largest paper: “In nearly seven decades spent fighting for freedom and equality, Nelson Mandela inspired the world.”

Not everyone believes that the outpouring of praise in Israel is honestly felt:
http://972mag.com/the-top-5-most-hypocritical-mandela-eulogies-by-israeli-politicians/83109/

I am sorry if this is not greatly contributing to the discussion but what a great comment Lawrence

geo @ 77: If it’s any reassurance, I think Robespierre and Lenin would have had other things to worry about.

“There were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.”

Which is not to say that Mandela didn’t make the right choices during the transition. It must have been indescribably difficult, knowing what de Klerk’s army and police were up to while the negotiations were going forward.

As a side note, I recall that Roger Casement, unlike Irish nationalists in general at the time of the Boer War, loathed the Boers, having observed at first hand their treatment of the natives.

Re: Numerically the victims are a much smaller population, a thousand or so as against the tens

Though, how do you balance the interest of a couple thousand nomadic Khoisan people, against the couple of million (I’d guess) Tswana residents of Botswana? The Tswana are fairly undeveloped/poor too by most standards (though fairly economically advanced by African standards, more so than Black South Africans), and neither of them clearly fits into an ‘oppressor’ or ‘victim’ group. The government of Botswana could certainly make an argument that the desert and its mineral resources belong to all residents of Botswana, not just the small minority that happened to traditionally live there.

Google and Bartleby to the rescue, in case Suzanne doesn’t see the question right away.

It’s a great quotation.

@JanieM
thanks, wouldn’t have guessed. (‘A Connecticut Yankee…’ being yet another of the many gaps in my education.)

@Alison P: Cheers!

re: Suzanne and the Twain quote, @ 92

As I recall, Hank ends up machine gunning whole legions of the locals, and is trapped behind a wall of their rotting corpses in his stronghold. I think there is more than a little of Twain’s wry irony in Hank’s apparent enthusiasm for both the Terror and for efficient Yankee utility.

@102: The quote seems to me, in and out of context, to be an expression of sympathy for the pain and suffering of the humble and not an example of “wry irony.” As you know, the novel has little use for feudal authority. There is some satire of Twain’s own society in the novel, to be sure, but that wasn’t his central target. I didn’t quote all of it:

“Why, it was like reading about France and the French, before the ever memorable and blessed Revolution, which swept a thousand years of such villainy away in one swift tidal-wave of blood–one: a settlement of that hoary debt in the proportion of half a drop of blood for each hogshead of it that had been pressed by slow tortures out of that people in the weary stretch of ten centuries of wrong and shame and misery the like of which was not to be mated but in hell.”

Boy, that’s some wry irony.

@103: geo, I was referring to your comment in the post about your own likely fate during those dangerous times. My apologies for the snark and you’re most welcome for the quote.

Regarding the transition, “blacks kill the whites” was not the only or even the most likely failure mode. There were several and here is an list, probably not exhaustive. The first three would have been initiated by the whites.

1) Military coup
2) attempt to set up a Volkstaat
3) terrorism/destabilisation leading to 1 or 2
4) “race war” as the whites saw it
5) civil war among rival black forces e.g MK vs IFP

Of course, any of these scenarios could have occurred in combination (for example 1 or 2 leading to 4 or 5, or 3 leading to 1 or 2 or even 4, and of course 5 could have led to 1 or 2).

There was a bit of 3, and a half hearted effort at 2, but the one that came closest to happening was 5, and in KwaZulu-Natal it kind of did.

Mandela’s achievement in getting the transition right should be measured accordingly, in that he avoided the first four scenarios and pulled 5 back from already being over the brink.

If you read it as a transition to democracy, you might say that pretty much all of them worked more or less, but of course that was very much an open question in 1990 and even in 1994. If you read it as a long-drawn-out decolonisation, well, there were some of those that ran through all 5 scenarios above, sometimes repeatedly.

@JWMason:
But for people like JG, LFC and Ronan(rf), the end of apartheid was a foregone conclusion, or just not a big deal. The only violence that concerns them is the violence of the oppressed.

No, an inaccurate/unfair summary of the views expressed.
I’ve no doubt that Alex is right that ” ‘blacks kill the whites’ was not the only or even the most likely failure mode.” This all started w your (JWM’s) intemperate remark upthread on JG’s initial comment. But I think, if we all stepped back, we’d see that there is not that much actual disagreement here. We all agree, I think, that the transition could have been worse in various ways, incl. more violence by the white minority or parts of it than occurred (though there was some), and within that overall judgment I think we’re just left w a question of differing emphasis, if that. That’s my sense of it, at any rate.

While it is true that South Africa has a great deal of public protest about housing, sanitation, health care, education and basic services, it could be that a careful checking of the record will show sharp improvement here by the ANC since the days of apartheid. At the same, there was important protest against the ANC for the repression unleashed against the workers at the Marikana mines. One wonders if Mandela’s legacy would have been different had Chris Hani been alive to succeed him rather than Mbeki.

Acemoglu and Robinson from their blog:

“In 1993 the financial services company Sanlam sold 10% of its stake in Metropolitan Life to a black owned consortium led by Nthato Motlana, a former secretary of the ANC’s Youth League and one-time doctor to Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu. After 1994 the number of these deals began to grow rapidly, reaching 231 by 1998 and by this time some estimates suggest that as much as 10% of the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) was owned by black businesses. This was a spontaneous start to what has become known in South Africa as Black Economic Empowerment.

Put crudely, these first deals were attempts by white capital to give the ANC political elite a stake in the private enterprise economy they dominated. Perhaps the major driver of the lack of effective reform in the extractive economic institutions of Apartheid is not just that the ANC elite were fearful of collapse but also because they started seeing their personal interests in the continuation of the same economic institutions.

And of course, this is nothing but a version of Robert Michels’s Iron Law of Oligarchy. Some evidence that there is at least some truth to this comes from the following figure which plots the relationships between leading South African firms and prominent ANC politicians.
[diagram missing]
Each link represents a non-executive directorship that a particular politician holds. This figure contains some of the most powerful people in the ANC including Cyril Ramaphosa (middle), the man who negotiated the transitional agreement with the National Party; Tokyo Sexwale (middle right), long time prisoner in Robben Island with Nelson Mandela; Max Sisulu (top left), son of Walter Sisulu, one of the founders of the ANC youth league with Nelson Mandela and one of the towering figures in the struggle against Apartheid.

So could it be that although initially the transition in 1994 started creating inclusive political institutions, this process has been reversed by the capture of the new black political elite by the white business elite? Could it be that this has then ensured the continued domination of the economy by the white business elite even as the white political elite has been cast aside after 1994?”

#112:
Those A&R posts are fairly damning, considering they come from such a mainstream source.

Re: 4) “race war” as the whites saw it

The Afrikaner leadership took the concept of race war very seriously indeed. Some evidence came out in the late 1990s that their biological warfare program was largely focused on developing pathogens that selectively killed Black people.

@109: As I recall, the Catholic Church creates a country-wide hysteria against Hank’s innovations, resulting in the massacre of thousands of knights who dopily charge against far superior technology. Hank doesn’t start the bloodbath and doesn’t want it.

“Which leads me to wonder if actions taken on a calculation of suffering (a half drop of blood in exchange for a whole hogshead, and then happily ever after!”

The quote from Twain acknowledges that the Terror involved murder – not calculated murder, but killing enacted in the passion of the moment in response to centuries of oppression. You can certainly argue about how true that is (and Twain doesn’t allow for the ordinary people who were caught up in the Terror as well), but his central point is while those deaths survive vividly in popular memory and political debate, the everyday violence, death, and suffering that preceded them is elided or downplayed.

Mandela did the right thing, I believe, but it did mean that a lot of people literally got away with murder, people far more directly culpable than many of those in the tumbrils, and that ghastly economic inequality was perpetuated for the foreseeable future.

I would have thought that the problem with the ANC is that it has outlived its time. It was an anti-colonialist liberation front rather than an ordinary political party, and as such was not designed to act in a democracy.

This is a good point.

@JW

So I am sounding a bit Pickwickian perhaps. But I’d argue that plurality and conflict within the bounds of a democratic polity are made more possible, not less, when the antagonists show a modicum of respect for each other, and respect for the very real differences between them. That doesn’t mean I condone the ability of the strong to dominate the weak. I suppose what I am trying to express is that the struggles to define how the concepts of liberty and equality are lived are going to work out better for all concerned when conducted in an atmosphere of fraternity.

On a personal note, I would myself never engage in, condone, encourage, ask, or, god forbid, require that any one else engage in, pre-meditated violence on a picket line or other protest. Passive resistance, civil disobedience, different deal if done voluntarily and with a good understanding of the possible consequences. For this I make no apologies.

” Alex-
That is helpful….”

Yes, and said throughout the thread if you were willing to read with the slightest bit of generosity/competence.

@118 Suzanne “Hank doesn’t start the bloodbath and doesn’t want it. ”

That’s true, but doesn’t Hank just reek of hubristic Yankee pride in his own abilities to set the messed up locals straight? That’s why I think he ends up like a NATO garrison on a forgotten hill in Afghanistan — compelled in some bizzare way they can’t really understand to be mowing down the people they’ve been sent to ‘help.’

GRE@125 – “Samuel P Huntington was advising the South African state in the late 70′s and early 80′s on security matters at the very time when extra-parliamentary politics was beginning to take hold in civil society.”

Are you saying that Huntyington had something to do with the clampdown on agitation ?

What Mandela was able to do was make a credible commitment on behalf of the black population not to seek revenge for the wrongs they had suffered, this gave the white ruling class enough confidence that they were willing to capitulate. The apartheid regime still possessed substantial military capabilities and could have held out for quite a long time, fear can be a great motivator. Mandela’s stature was such that even the most extreme black groups would obey his call for forgiveness.

Sure, but flipside we want to incentivise them to go now, and we normally do that by making “go now” lead to better outcomes than “go later”. Or by making “go tomorrow” lead to worse outcomes than “go today”, and “go next year” lead to worse outcomes still.

There’s a conflict here, prisoner’s dilemma. From time to time it’s going to happen that a particular repressive leadership stays far too long, and from a global perspective, to keep the “worse outcomes” credible, we’re going to have to carry them out.

Ultimately it’s an empirical question.

Huntington’s claims that South Africa was a satisfied society, couched in mathematical formulations, were subjected to scores of pages of critique by the mathematician Serge Lang. This led to a famous controversy about Huntington’s nomination to the NAS; the Chair of Huntington’s department Robert Putnam and his graduate student Fareed Zakaria rallied to Huntington’s defense.

There is no issue about which Samuel P. Huntington has not been wrong.

I have no interest in defending (the late) S.Huntington, who was wrong about various things (notably Vietnam). Wd just note that in the 400+ pp. of Political Order in Changing Societies there might be one or two things that are right. But I’ll leave that to those more closely familiar w his work. (I haven’t yet read the article linked by R.Bhandari @133 but I plan to.)

Btw, the diss. that Zakaria wrote under Huntington’s supervision, published as From Wealth to Power, is worth reading, or at least parts of it are. Perhaps best to ignore the IR-theory/pol-sci carapace and just read it as a historical essay.

LFC,
have not read Zakaria’s whole book, just the intro that the NYT put on line.

I think that Zakaria’s central question could easily be flipped: not why did it take so long for the US to to become a world power but why it became one as early as it did. Given that the rising industrial North, unlike most European states, was able to procure seemingly most of the timber, ores, cotton and foodstuffs that it needed often through “internal colonialism” organized around formally unfree labor relations–the “internal colonies” also possibly serving as vent for excess capital–why did the US find itself dabbling in world politics at the turn of the century?

“Do you have any data sources on economic inequality in Apartheid-era South Africa?”

No. But it’s the highest in the world today. So, in a sense – comparatively – it’s at least as bad as the apartheid-era South Africa.

Rakesh @138
An interesting question (albeit one that I don’t want to get into too much as it is OT w/r/t the thread). I would say you’re assuming in the question an economic-driven model of expansion/imperialism that is partial at best. Been a while since I’ve looked at the book, but Zakaria’s ‘state-centered realism’ no doubt has flaws, and one of them may be that it has to treat the U.S.’s westward continental expansion as something basically different from its subsequent overseas expansion. In one sense it was different; in another sense perhaps not so much. I think I’ll leave it there for now.

Layman,

Economic inequality between racial groups seems to be about as bad today as it was in 1994. In 1994, White household made about 7.5 times as much as Black households, today it’s about 7:1. The same holds true for per capita income. The trends are getting worse, for what it’s worth: Black incomes are stagnating while white incomes are growing pretty fast.

The real big winners from the end of apartheid seem to be the South African Indians, who have greatly narrowed the gap with the White population.

LFC: “he apparently (?) sees nothing to choose between the two societies”
“Put more directly, apartheid was an evil in itself, thus its elimination must be counted a good thing, period.”

There are different ways to establish and maintain a hierarchy. They switched to a modern, socially acceptable way, preserved the hierarchy, it has become stable, and even praiseworthy. I’d find it hard to think about it as a good thing, without feeling that I’ve been fooled somehow.

“why don’t you go find a south African forum about Mandela and try peddling that shit there, see how many people agree with you ”

Why would I want to do it, what is it supposed to prove? Not to mention that only about 20% of the population there use the internet. Those who do, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if most of them support the new model.

Who said it was anything unusual? It was indeed a very typical development, for the last 30 years or so. Increasing the depth of hierarchy and legitimatizing it.

Incidentally, it surprises me that de Klerk’s government doesn’t get any credit here for the smooth transition and all that. I mean, didn’t they design, organize and manage the whole thing? Had Mandela refused to play, they could’ve always gotten rid of him and find someone else.

Not bait-and-switch. Modernization, I’d say, of an anachronistic and impractical model of (a part of) social relations.

I mean, the credit for designing and managing a smooth transition, as opposed to potentially a much more messy and bloody one, – and, potentially, with much more radical consequences. Of course I don’t really care who gets the credit, but I read the discussion, and it seems odd that de Klerk&Co are not even mentioned as agents of this transition. And they had all the power. And a nuclear bomb.

Mao Cheng Ji:
Modernization, I’d say, of an anachronistic and impractical model of (a part of) social relations.

I’d say: Elimination of an unjust model of social relations. But Mao’s dime-store Marxism rules out such “moralistic” language. Justice and injustice apparently have no meaning to Mao C.J., and right and wrong are apparently fictions. For Mao C.J., only power is real; everything else is illusory. Marx himself arguably had a somewhat more complicated perspective, but that wd derail the thread.

I don’t know about Marx, you’ll need to take it up with him. But my point was, actually, that the new model (having the hierarchy exactly (or almost exactly) as steep as the old one) is exactly as unjust. The criteria by which human beings are selected to be high up or deep down are not all that relevant. Skin color or greed+energy+IQ, what difference does it make. I mean, sure, it does make some difference, but the change is not even obviously positive. Instead of people with pale skin, you have a bunch of sociopaths of all skin tones on top, ruling you. How is it any better?

Sure. There are racial supremacy theories, and there is social darwinism, and they are not the same thing. Granted. But both are objectionable.

Citation for above is http://www.marxists.org/archive/draper/1969/abc/abc.htm#CHAPTER3 – the cite tag doesn’t work the way I thought it did.

Re: since 1994, how do those ratios look for e.g.

Inequality is worse in South Africa than in the United States or Western Europe. For that matter, inequality is worse in South Africa than anywhere in the world that reports data, except for Botswana, Sierra Leone and Lesotho.

I’m not aware that being a one-party state has much to do with it (the Communist one-party states had relatively low inequality), and while Africa as a whole has high inequality, it’s generally less severe than in South Africa.

For what it’s worth, 20-25 years ago much of Latin America had similar levels of inequality to South Africa (IIRC Brazil, Chile, Venezuela, and others were comparable to South Africa). Over the last 20-25 years, Latin America has made a lot of progress on that front (both under hard left regimes like in Venezuela, and soft-left ones like in Brazil), whereas South Africa has not.

A lot of this seems related to Michael Pettis’ recent books/articles on China’s need to adjust economically

http://blog.mpettis.com/2013/12/the-politics-of-adjustment/

With less money going towards the elite and more to ordinary households if they want to secure another round of stable growth.
Apparently the adjustment is more likely to be successful in democracies or countries with highly centralised decision making (Which looks goood for SA as it appears one of the positives post apartheid has been a genuine, vibrant stable democracy. – His case studies of successful adjustments also inlude Brazil, as per Hector)

“offers more than negligible benefits when you have been denied many basic human rights for so long”

These are just words. Someone living in a slum without electricity, running water, or sewage, in a 2x3m shack made of cardboard; no food, no government services, no police, no nothing, – what human rights, as a practical matter, do they have now that they didn’t have before 1994?

The A and R post quoted by Rakesh above links to another of their posts which deals (a little) with positive ANC policies:

“Nevertheless, the ANC made progress. They created a vibrant participatory democracy, something that white rule had never dreamed of. They created a new system of social transfers which radically reduced poverty. They built three million new houses for poor people in the townships.

But inequality, rather than going down, went up.”

I asked about changes in wealth inequality, not absolute. This blog is full of posts about how inequality has increased in the USA and UK since the 1990s, but Mao is claiming it declined slightly in SA. If so, then it appears Mandela’s one party state avoided the worst excesses of the neo-liberal experiment. Not a great claim to fame, but better than nothing.

It’s a simple difference-in-difference model with ending apartheid as the intervention. I thought there were economists reading this blog … sheesh!

I think you’re still missing the point, Hector, which is that compared to the democratic west South Africa has done well in the neo-liberal era. Mao seems to be claiming that SA swapped racial domination for neo-liberal domination and nothing has been changed; your point seems to be that Mandela won personal freedom for blacks but didn’t do much for their economic freedom. Compared to what happened in the USA and UK over the same time period, SA has not reduced the economic power of its poorest. Therefore, both your claims are wrong.

What should be said is that the ANC freed black Africans from apartheid and, despite inheriting a one-party, corrupt system, they managed to resist the lure of neo-liberalism, and didn’t rob their poorest blind as elites in the west did.

Seems like a win to me.
[and yes, HIV is the cause of the decline in the human development index, and probably also should be considered when assessing the poverty of the poorest blacks in SA].

[and let’s also not forget that HIV’s first 10 years in SA occurred under de Klerk, not Mandela or Mbeki]

@172:

SA’s gini went from a high 60 to a higher 72, under ANC rule. (The U.S. gini went from 38 in the 1960’s to 48 today). And economic growth has been mediocre at around 2%/yr. What part of that are you not understanding?

Isn’t there more important things for a poor, developing country to deal with before inequality. Such as:
– extending education opportunities
– delivering basic services
– improving housing/infrastruture
-developing public health programs
– creating jobs

I don’t see how they could have dealt with inequality in any meaningful way in the working through similar institutions, and the same elite that existed under apartheid.
Corruption and inequality are certainly important, but I would have thought in the mid-long term. At this stage they’re probably inevitable

Well theoretically it would be dealing with the long term drivers of inequality, but what effect is it going to have on reducing inequality in the short term? Or am I missing something..?

To be fair, one reason that domestic and international capitalist interests were somewhat tolerant of moderate leftism in Brazil, is because they were afraid that if the da Silva government failed, something even further left (along the lines of Chavez) would take their place.

BW:
I would think your list *is* dealing with inequality. So, what does “before” mean?
Bruce, I assume you’re aware that inequality is related to but *not*, I repeat not, the same as, the items on ronan’s list. See my comment @167 and ronan’s 178.

faustusnotes @181: interesting.

john, I quoted a whole bunch of other stuff that shows the evidence is not as simple as you suggest. You clearly haven’t read the article, it gives a much more nuanced view than you seem to want to cling to.

The counterpunch article you link to is full of basic flaws, but it seems to be citing the world bank’s figures on Gini, perhaps via wikipedia (it’s hard to know since, as is typical of counterpunch, it can’t be bothered giving sources). I note it chooses the higher one and doesn’t go for any more nuance than that. The top decile of South Africa’s population own 58% of its income; compared to 50% in the USA. Is that so different to where most commenters here live?

And how does the USA’s progress over time look?. Since 1997 it appears that the top decile of the US wealth distribution have really consolidated their hold on the nation’s wealth, going from owning about 42% of it to about 50%.

If you’re going to do these comparisons, you should try to do them properly. Every country in the world has suffered under neo-liberal reform, and you aren’t marshalling much evidence to suggest that SA has done worse than the USA or UK.

FFS, how many times do I have to say it? I don’t think the cases of SA and the US and UK are comparable, I think every country fell victim to neo-liberalism in the last 20 years and Mandela protected his people a lot better than Clinton and Bush and Obama have theirs. Income inequality in SA is static or slowly improving. Income inequality in the USA has sky-rocketed.

And that’s without considering the baseline circumstances, the development issues, the trajectories of the rest of Africa, the obvious challenges in recovering from 10 years of sanctions, and the pervasive role of HIV. Where do you think income inequality in the USA would be at now if it had the same epidemic characteristics as SA?

Some perspective would really help.

Perspective from where? Outer space?

Faustusnotes,

None of this has anything to do with him being an African leaders. There are African leaders who were arguably better leaders than Mandela, and there are certainly leaders who accomplished more radical change than he did. It’s probably true that none of them were faced with Mandela’s problem of not wanting to kill the goose that laid the golden eggs, since in most African countries there were never any golden eggs to start with.